The growing use of Cloud technology in business is nothing short of phenomenal. The reason for this is that it saves on time, cost and enables flexible working. Despite these benefits, I find that many charities are still resisting its adoption. Recent research by Technology Trust found that, of 426 respondents, 58 per cent of charities still don’t use the cloud – 65.1 per cent of which are small charities. With the array of articles written about the benefits of the cloud, I wanted to know why.

First we had BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) – now hot on its heels is WYOD (Wear Your Own Devices). If there is a lesson to be learnt for enterprises it is that the consumerisaton of technology has crept up on them and created some major challenges in terms of network management, security and best practice.

For years now there has been talk of how business is driving IT to move to cloud. In many cases, business teams go so far as to circumvent IT and buy cloud services themselves, taking decisions into their own hands. Much has also been written about why IT should eagerly accept this imperative and embrace the use of cloud. In reality, however, managing a cloud footprint is much harder and more specialised than many imagine.

Everybody stop it – yes, stop it! What I mean is, everyone is talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) as if it’s some life changing experience – well, I don’t necessarily want to be the bearer of a reality check but it’s not! Well, at least not for now. It’s just a term; a simple phrase that’s captured a new sense of excitement and imagination across an industry that’s always eager to deliver the next big thing. In fact, the likes of Intel, Samsung, Dell and many others have established a consortium to help shape and deliver a sensible notion of just how and what the IoT might deliver to both the consumer and industry.

DevOps is increasingly seen as a key component for efficiency and reducing time-to-market. Development environments, like the development methodologies themselves, are becoming more agile. Service level agreements, high availability and response time are being applied to the development environment to improve time to market. This is where open hybrid cloud can serve as a platform of choice for developers to drive the “new production” process.

I attended almost every OpenStack summit event over the past few years, including last year in Hong Kong and Portland, and even lead the OpenStack community in Israel. But somehow, this year the OpenStack Summit felt completely different than any of the previous events. OpenStack is coming into its own, and has reached a point of no return. There are now so many companies betting on its success that it simply cannot fail. But that wasn’t the only reason I got that impression, this year unlike previous years our booth was busy with real customers with budget and plans to execute on building OpenStack deployments.

Every time new technologies enter the mainstream there is a bedding-in period; big data, and more specifically Hadoop, is no different. The UK market is still very much in its infancy and many organisations are struggling to make a proper business case; is it a next-generation analytics platform? Is it an open-source storage platform? Either way, the bottom line is that if your organisation generates a lot of data, Hadoop is likely to be on your radar already, but understanding how to sell it to the business is a skill in itself.

At the beginning of John Hughes’ classic 1985 movie, The Breakfast Club, five students from vastly different social high school strata meet in detention. At first, they don’t talk to each other, behaving as if they have nothing in common. Over the course of an afternoon, they start to talk about how their school is a codified system where each area is beholden to the concerns of their particular group, conditioned to resent the roles of others and unable to see past their own day to day issues. Remind you of anything at your company?

Gartner predicts that more than 60% of banks worldwide will turn to the cloud by 2016 as they realise that it is more cost-effective for handling big data than legacy IT. But despite the well-known benefits of cloud computing, 75% of banks in Europe are using outdated core banking systems.

The beauty of an effective enterprise app store is that it hands control back to the IT department, allowing it to provide a true IT-as-a-Service capability. Enterprises need to wake up to the reality of utilising app stores as a secure, cost-effective employee management function. Whilst app stores seemingly appear to be a one-size-fits-all dream solution to managing employee cloud services, it requires a realistic evaluation of the need for control across all departments; from procurement to IT.